A poorly designed map can not only look visually unappealing, but can convey the wrong message, which could lead to bad decisions being made.

I would like to ask people to post examples (that are in the public realm) of poorly designed maps, WITH justification on why it is bad design.

Although this 'question' does not have a clear answer, IMO it will proove a useful resource to see what merits bad design, so others can learn what NOT to do. I will let the votes choose the 'right' answer.

I think now that normal people are more used to Google Maps style/simplicity, web-maps should follow a similar approach.

With the explosion of 'NeoGeography' particularly in the web realm, we now have a lot of non-GIS professionals creating maps for the web. A lot of these developers are often very good at user-interface design, but not trained in cartographic principles.
IMO, with web maps, its all about combining the skills of both cartography and user interface design.

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Good topic. Speaking of 'NeoGeography' equally as 'bad' is the improper use of some maps / services. News agencies love to show panning and zooming animations of Google Earth and like satellite imagery. Often, I can't even tell what geographical region they're showing; all i can see are strips of imagery, etc.
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JakubOct 31 '10 at 18:55

I was going to ask for some commentary concerning why these are bad maps, but one only needs a single glance to see what the problems are. Outstanding examples!
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whuber♦Dec 22 '11 at 19:05

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Are you kidding? I love flouro green on a low-contrast yellow background!
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naught101May 22 '12 at 0:31

Don't miss the blue gradient :) And that just really shows that this is not designed map, but just stock vector, used as background for whatever purpose and looks like out of league.
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zetahDec 3 '12 at 0:40

I found a couple of examples of very poor choropleth maps posted on wikipedia depicting income inequality and poverty by nation. Although both metrics depict a continuous phenomenon, they chose seemingly random colors to depict different ranges along the continuum (not even diverging colors, random bright colors). I've reduced the size in the files I've uploaded compared to the originals (GINI, poverty), as I believe they have made me ill viewing the full size files (so beware!)

For a critique, it seems obvious they should have chosen a continuous color scheme (one that goes in a single shade from light to dark or vice versa) for each of the metrics since they represent continuous data (you should follow your own advice wikipedia!) Perhaps the scheme would be appropriate for nominal data, but even then I don't think such bright colors are a great choice (perhaps a few small multiple maps depicting certain categories would be easier to read). For a more palatable set of color choices, checking out the work of Cynthia Brewer and her Colorbrewer applet is a good start.

As a note on the original source, it says it is from the CIA world factbook, (which the data surely is) but I couldn't find any map this silly looking at the actual CIA world factbook website and can't trace it back through the Wikipedia commons for those files. It may be an original work, which I thought was against Wikipedia's policy. Maybe instead of complaining I should upload a new one!

Original maps and diagrams are not against Wikipedia policy, just like original (unplagiarised) text is not. The policy is No Original Research (i.e., data, conclusions, interpretations).
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MaxOct 24 '14 at 7:44

I consider the making of a map or graph to be original research (without regard to Wikipedia's policy), but I understand the utility of being able to upload supplementary materials to aid understanding.
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Andy WOct 24 '14 at 11:44

Although this map is aesthetically pleasing (at least the small multiples on the left), I believe it is quite poor when all three of the layers are plopped on top of one another. For what I believe are better ways of displaying such multivariate data check out this other thread on the site - Effectively displaying demographic data on a printed map .

Another example of color blending like this is in Friendly (2007). To be more explicit about what is problematic about these color schemes are that they confound observations in the color scheme. That is, a polygon can have different attribute values, yet receive the same color! (see this presentation, An Empirical Study of Colour Use by Paul Murrell and Ross Ihaka for a more detailed description of this). The above citation of Friendly gives an example in the footnote where two different sets of the same attributes would map to the same color. This just extends in trying to discriminate between observations by color in the current map. You have to do some impossible mental mapping of colors to figure out what the original attribute values are, and it isn't quite as simple as the legend makes it seem.

Below I have tried to recreate what their legend would have looked liked. Although I ended up being unsucessful, I think it is still enlightening as to what the problem is (I suspect I was unsuccessful not only due to my initial colors being off, but also because the transparency overlay is likely not consistent within and between colors to achieve the above map, it is also possible the way my software handles transparency and colors is different than their application). To read the legend is as follows, the ugly colors in the upper right is the blended panel of all threes colors. The array of how the colors are organized are demonstrated in the neighboring panels below and to the left. Within swatches the yellow gradient increases, down the panels the blue gradient increases, and to the right of the panels the red gradient increases.

It is easy to see the contrast between items is greatly diminished when the colors are blended together. Although it may seem like I intentionally re-created a crappy example, in a bit of experimentation I was never able to reproduce the array of colors within their map, and all of the produced legends suffered from essentially the same problem (so if you let me know the magic colors to produce their map I would be glad to replicate them here).

As a note, I suspect I saw this map referenced somewhere else besides the original site (perhaps FlowingData), that probably also made a comment about how poor the color scheme is. If I come across the other source originally pointing me to this map I will reference it.
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Andy WMar 30 '11 at 17:53

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+1 The closer you look, the more puzzling the map becomes. It took me a while to realize that red and yellow are representing similar things--educational attainment as measured in two ways--but in inverse senses, so that there are really only two factors being shown here, not three.
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whuber♦Dec 22 '11 at 19:21

"a polygon can have different attribute values, yet receive the same color!" - I don't see how this can be true, considering they are using three primary (orthogonal) colours. Every colour should have a unique combination...
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naught101May 20 '12 at 23:23

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@naught101, you are correct, I misinterpreted Friendly's original article, his legend that he produced confounded observations, not the actually amounts of RGB in the map (which is alittle naughty of him to produce an inaccurate legend), see footnote 14 on page 392. I will update my response in a bit when I get a chance, but note it largely doesn't change my point. Orthogonal in color space is not orthogonal in how we interpret different colors. In particular, when mixing an already saturated color it is very difficult to distinguish between saturation in another hue (let alone 2 hues!)
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Andy WMay 21 '12 at 12:20

Definitely agree on the point about interpretation of colors. Was just being nit-picky :)
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naught101May 22 '12 at 0:30

Not excactly an answer, but in the same vain as this thread. The book: How to Lie with Maps by Mark Monmonier is a fun read. Most of it is bad maps intentionally created to distort or hide data. Its so easy to manipulate maps to get your point across, the ideas in this book are good to keep in mind to make sure you don't really cross the line.

Mark Monmonier's how to lie book is certainly a classic and deserves to be widely read (and understood!). This answer however doesn't tell the reader what is wrong with the map depicted. The cutoff percentages are different, so what's wrong with that?
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matt wilkieSep 12 '11 at 19:12

I offer this one because it is typical of illustrations in a well-regarded textbook on cartography, so it's not a one-off bad map: it exemplifies what people are being taught in (some) universities.

The caption beneath it reads,

Map of residuals from regression. The geographic areas having Y values considerably under- or overpredicted relative to the regression line are mapped with identifiable area symbols. These sections of the study area need to be investigated more closely. Further data may be needed to determine why the dependent variables in these section behave as they do. Identifying deviate areas is a major application of residual mapping.

The problem is that this map and its interpretation are wrong in many important ways, starting from the very concept of its construction: a choropleth map of residuals is inferior to many other techniques available. The pattern of residuals mapped here not only is deceptive due to the poor cartography (and a truly awful legend), but in fact it is to be expected of residuals from a really good regression! In this fashion the book's author is creating a problem where none exists, developing unrealistic expectations, and recommending a potentially expensive and meaningless additional data collection effort.

The classification method is peculiar : Indonesia and China belongs to the same class (234M / 1,338M).

The classification presented in legend does not reflect the real data values. Paraguay population is 6.4M, but the legend says its class begins at 9.8M (but the values are drawn from same source : World Bank).

The projection is inappropriate : it's a Mercator, look at the size of the Groënland for example. The size of the continental masses are grossly distorted relatively to the real surfaces proportions. No justification for this.

As a result of the previous remark, the scale presented is only true at a specific latitude (not precised), not for the whole map as implicitly implied.

Data granularity is not coherent with some displayed large map entities : Alaska is in the same class as U.S.A, Groënland as Denmark.

As a result of the previous remark, Groënland is falsely represented as belonging the minimal population class, which starts at 9.8M, but its population is only 57,000.

Legend colors are different than the map colors (verified with the photoshop eyedrop tool) (!).

At the default scale, the great lakes and inland seas are the same color as the countries, only a shade darker.

At the default scale, the map is cropped in the four directions.

Order of elements in the legend are reversed, compared to the recommended order (see for example T. A. Slocum, Thematic Cartography and Visualization, Prentice Hall, 1999 and B. D. Dent, Cartography: Thematic Map Design, McGraw-Hill, 1999), but it's the default setting for ESRI software.

Contour color is not enough contrasted relatively to some of the darker surface colors. For example, try to see the border between Turkey and Iran, or between some west-european countries.

Inexplicable lack of data : French Guyane.

Sorry, too tired to continue, it's quite painful.

My source for the discovery of this "pearl" is Maxime from the ForumSIG.

Please elaborate on your critique of the map. Perhaps we should not be worried about population growth, as about 1/3 of the Northern hemisphere (Russia) is decreasing in population growth!
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Andy WJan 4 '12 at 20:19

(+1) Good critique! The narrative is as confusing as the map, because it talks simultaneously about population and population density without clearly distinguishing them. This confusion may be at the root of many of the inappropriate map design choices: the map maker isn't really sure what they are showing or trying to say.
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whuber♦Jan 4 '12 at 21:43

These are popping up ALL over FB, Gmail, and in general the internet. Everyone raves about them, but I think they're awful, especially considering they represent such simple data. Questions I have:
What does the darkness/density of color mean? More responses? Was that more responses per capita, per surveys distributed?
Are the white areas no response? Were they surveyed at all?
Unfortunately the answers to those questions are available on the PhD student's website, but completely neglected when other websites shared the maps.

Another answer pointed this out for another map; this map overlays significant amounts of data such that it doesn't depict much more than a rough estimate of population density.

Is rateable value by age depicted by the area of the pie chart, or the diameter? The legend says "rateable value by age", so is there a correlation between the area or diameter of the pie chart and the age distribution?

In each pie chart, do the proportions represent the percentage of warehouses that were built in that time period, as of 2003?

I live in France. I am old enough to like maps. I prefer to see a picture of where I am going, instead of being given instructions by a machine.
But I find some online maps are virtually unreadable when printed out.

Google is the worst - totally unreadable at night under tungsten lighting.

Mappy is somewhat better.

Michelin is quite good, especially when compared to the other two.

I would have thought that Google, with all their wealth and wisdom, could have spent a little time thinking about why somebody might want to print a map and the circumstances in which they would be using it. If they find that too difficult, I would be happy to offer my services as a consultant, for a modest fee!

I suspect you're confused as to what a map actually is. Would it make sense to have the telephone map above shown on a globe?
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MerseyVikingApr 6 '11 at 10:32

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Of course not. I'm talking about digital maps with a small scale. Eg: google maps if you zoom out enough. Antartica is bigger than all other continents combined! maps.google.com/…
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johanvdwApr 6 '11 at 11:28

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I think the downvotes here are not because people contend with the central proposition, that any projection by it's very nature is "bad" in that it paints a distorted picture the real thing, but rather because that problem is not clearly explained here. Johan's point is strong: if you use a given projection outside it's domain, it is in fact a bad map. Just because everyone including giants like microsoft and google do it doesn't mean they're not committing fundamental mistakes. (and I'd argue they, or at least some of them, know it's a mistake, but there's value above and beyond the mistake).
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matt wilkieSep 12 '11 at 19:24

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Good point, @matt. I haven't downvoted this reply, but I did not upvote it, either, because it is far too general. For instance, no Mercator map can possibly show the earth as a globe, but nevertheless all Mercator maps are perfectly designed when used for their original purpose of plotting loxodromic courses across oceans. This, I think, gets to the heart of the matter: what makes a map "bad" has to be considered in the context of its intended purpose and audience. One map might at the same time be both bad and good from two legitimate viewpoints.
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whuber♦Dec 22 '11 at 19:12